A Big Happy Group

“The Lost Symbol“ by Dan Brown was published a few days ago. His last book, “The DaVinci Code” has more than 81 million copies in print world wide. With books sales down about 15% this year the entire publishing industry is hoping that “The Lost Symbol” will pull consumers into bookstores and boost sales for everyone.

At one point Random House said they “had not made a decision” on when to release the electronic edition. It sounded like they were going to use “The Lost Symbol” as a test case for challenging Amazon’s Kindle franchise. Yesterday a little more came to light about this book and the decision to release the Kindle version.

Random House stands to earn $30 to $35 million dollars from “The Lost Symbol”. To put that in perspective, the world wide Random House Publishing Group made an operating profit of $29 million dollars in the first 6 months of this year.

I’d guess that Random House will listen pretty closely to what Dan Brown requests.

Some publishing executives thought Random House might respond [to the Kindle pricing model] by holding back the e-book publication of “The Lost Symbol” until later in the publishing cycle, creating a direct challenge to Amazon.

But Mr. Brown, interviewed in midtown Manhattan, said he didn’t want his book to be a test case.

“As an author, you want your book to be available in as many formats as possible,” Mr. Brown says. “I know that some of my readers have e-book readers, and I wanted my book available for them.” He says it was ultimately a group decision.